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Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City presents a refreshingly different look on the now popular and always relevant subject of an imminent post-society, post-USA, post-apocalyptic world. It doesn’t get too bogged down in the details of the global meltdown, but the indications here of an America on the verge of self-destruction exacerbated by global environmental concerns about rising sea levels are familiar ones and we should already have a good idea of how that will play out (and be concerned about it in real life). Miller’s interest is more about how society might cope with it afterwards, and it has more ideas than the common Max Mad-like dystopias of marauding red-necks preying on communities for scarce resources. Blackfish City however also has some other interesting ideas of how society reforms itself in the aftermath of disaster and returns to deeper foundations. The obvious consequence of rising sea levels and the downfall of the American republic and the type of society that it repr...

Mick Herron's first entry into the Jackson Lamb/Slough House series is in some aspects a little more low-key compared to how it later develops and is quite slow to get started, but already many of the character traits and the dry sardonic look at the British Intelligence Services is very much in place in Slow Horses . Having said that, after it has taken some time to establish the nature of the dumping ground for failed spooks that is Slough House however, and the types of characters consigned there through incompetence, bad luck and well, personality problems. There is nothing low-key either about an MI5 undercover operation that goes badly wrong, and plenty of action and drama that results in a number of casualties among the ranks of the slow horses. As far as the operation goes, well it's still relevant today even if the post-9/11 world of terrorist activities has moved on and expanded considerably beyond this. A young man has been abducted, put in an orange jumpsuit and ho...

As entertaining an idea as Kaijumax is, the potential comedy and drama that can be derived from the monster prison situation is limited; too limited for an imaginative writer/artist like Zander Cannon. It’s good to see then that the world of Kaijumax  – and indeed the pan-dimensional multiverse – is expanded upon in Season Two: ‘The Seamy Underbelly’ . Cannon had already hinted as much in Season One that there’s considerably more to play with here with occasional excursions into the world, the universe and the dimensions beyond, and in Season Two he takes those first tenuous steps outside the prison cells/craters of Kaijumax with the escape of Electrogor and the Green Humongo. Well, it is a prison drama after all, so inevitably there has to be an escape… Cannon continues to play on the stereotypes, with the monsters as jive-talking criminal underworld types (“Yo mon!”, “My lizza”, “Move your ass, Megafauna”) and comic incongruity of monsters in that kind of situation. So when the...

Ever wondered what the Japanese authorities or Ultraman superhero teams do when they round up the monsters who have been raging and rampaging through the streets of downtown Tokyo? You haven’t? Well, Zander Cannon has and it turns out to be an interesting and fun idea for a comic that has a certain geeky coolness to it. So now that you have had time to think about it, just what the heck are you supposed to do with kaiju creatures like Mothra and Godzilla once they’ve been stopped in their tracks? Well, you could hope that they return to their undersea lair or remote volcanic island, but obviously the better way of ensuring that they or their offspring don’t return for a sequel is to lock them up, and for this purpose Zander Cannon has devised the maximum security kaiju monster prison island of Kaijumax. On Kaijumax you find that you have the same problems as any regular prison. More or less. There are tensions between inmates in the cells (craters), some of the more troublesome beast...

It doesn’t start out promisingly with that title, nor does it look like we are going to be troubled with any originality in the rather familiar characterisation of the Private Detective whose case we are going to be following in Niki Mackay’s debut, I, Witness . Madison Attallee is divorced, a recovering alcoholic, a bit of a slob, an ex-police officer who has left the force under a cloud, and the PI business isn’t going all that great. Madison at least has an efficient and well-organised secretary called Emma, but even she can’t turn up anything but a regular line of divorces cases for Madison to work on, or neglect as the case might be. It wasn’t terribly original when Robert Galbraith worked on a variation of this for Cormoran Strike, and making Madison a female doesn’t really change things that much, but Niki Mackay’s writing nonetheless keeps you involved, holding out for a case that could show this team to be equally worth of taking these well-worn conventions out for another air...

Such is the beautiful allegorical simplicity of Magnus Mills’ writing that there is something comforting and vaguely unsettling about his books at the same time. They are comforting in that Mills has a way of creating worlds – or observing how we create worlds – that operate to a clear set of rules, traditions and behaviours where we think we feel safe and unthreatened. There’s a sense of belonging to something meaningful, where we can control the conditions and remain immune from the uncertainties of change. What is unsettling about those situations, whether it be in the workplace, the simple life in the countryside, the satisfaction of traditional craft done well, is that no-one is immune to change. Rather than enjoying simple pleasures, the characters in Mills’ novels seem to spend more time trying to combating the incursion of foreign ways of thinking and behaving through complex rules and regulations that end up boxing themselves into a living nightmare. There is clearly an allego...